Gender-Role Attitudes in University Students in the United States, Slovenia, and Croatia

Determinants of gender-role attitudes were examined in samples of university students from Pittsburgh in the United States, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Osijek in Croatia. Surveys including items from the Attitudes Toward Women Scale and the Neosexism Scale were administered to a total of 1,544 U.S. students, 912 Slovene students, and 996 Croatian students between the years of 1991 and 2000. As predicted, men held less egalitarian or more sexist attitudes about the appropriate roles for women and men, and those with more frequent attendance at religious services held more sexist attitudes. No changes in attitudes were found for women over time, but Slovene males were found to become more traditional over time.     

Sequent-systems and groupoid models. I

The purpose of this paper is to connect the proof theory and the model theory of a family of propositional logics weaker than Heyting's. This family includes systems analogous to the Lambek calculus of syntactic categories, systems of relevant logic, systems related toBCK algebras, and, finally, Johansson's and Heyting's logic. First, sequent-systems are given for these logics, and cut-elimination results are proved. In these sequent-systems the rules for the logical operations are never changed: all changes are made in the structural rules. Next, Hubert-style formulations are given for these logics, and algebraic completeness results are demonstrated with respect to residuated lattice-ordered groupoids. Finally, model structures related to relevant model structures (of Urquhart, Fine, Routley, Meyer, and Maksimova) are given for our logics. These model structures are based on groupoids parallel to the sequent-systems. This paper lays the ground for a kind of correspondence theory for axioms of logics with implication weaker than Heyting's, a correspondence theory analogous to the correspondence theory for modal axioms of normal modal logics.The first part of the paper, which follows, contains the first two sections, which deal with sequent-systems and Hubert-formulations. The second part, due to appear in the next issue of this journal, will contain the third section, which deals with groupoid models.     

“Put a Little Love in Your Heart”: Acceptance of Paternalistic and Ally Political Discourses Both Predict Pro-Roma Solidarity Intentions Through Moral Inclusion

The way politicians talk about minorities institutes the normative context of intergroup relations. We investigated how endorsement of different political discourses predicts donation and collective action intentions by majority members toward the Roma in five European countries. The survey was conducted online using samples demographically similar to the populations of Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, France, and Ireland (N = 5,054). First, results showed that accepting paternalistic discourse versus discourse promoting allyship were not distinguishable; both promoted higher moral inclusion which in turn predicted higher prosocial intentions. Second, donations (i.e., immediate relief) and collective action (i.e., social change action) were driven by identical factors. Third, acceptance of openly hostile political discourse neither predicted moral exclusion, nor lower prosocial intentions. In summary, our research provides important evidence that when it comes to Roma—non-Roma relations, the previously established distinction between solidarity intentions that aim to solidify status relations versus bring about social change is completely blurred, presumably because of the social context in which any positive message communicates moral inclusion challenging the hostile status quo.     

Comprehension of nonlexical categories in agrammatism

The focus of the paper is a proposal advanced by Grodzinsky (1984, 1986, 1990) concerning a possible syntactic deficit in agrammatism with respect to nonlexical categories. Eight native speakers of Serbo-Croatian, who presented a clinical picture of Broca's aphasia with agrammatism, were tested. Subject's sensitivity to traces and their knowledge of the inflectional and determiner system was investigated using a grammaticality judgment paradigm. The processing load was further minimized by use of short sentences that unequivocally exemplified different syntactic violations. These steps led to significant improvement in the performance of agrammatic aphasics, a result that is incompatible with the claim that the content of nonlexical elements is lost in agrammatism.A partial account of the findings was presented at the 31 st Meeting of the Academy of Aphasia, October 24–26, 1993. Tucson, Arizona. The authors gratefully acknowledge help in data collection from Mile Vukovi, Faculty of Defectology, University of Belgrade, and from Jovanka Jezdimirovi and Veronika Ispanovi-Radojkovi, the Institute for Mental Health in Belgrade. This research was supported in part by a grant (HD-01994) to Haskins Laboratories from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.     

Persistent crying and parenting: Search for a butterfly in a dynamic system

The risks and causes of persistent crying in early infancy are discussed on the basis of a study of 61 infants referred to the Munich Interdisciplinary Research and Intervention Program for Fussy Babies for persistent crying between 1 and 6 months of age, and of a community sample of 51 infants of the same age. Particular attention was paid to pre-verbal parent-infant communication, the development of which was interpreted in terms of a dynamic interactional system including both regulatory and communicative predispositions in infants and intuitive competence for supporting infant predispositions in parents. Neither a gut problem nor any other single causal factor was identified for persistent crying in the majority of cases. In contrast, persistent crying was significantly associated with multiple biological and psychosocial risk factors for both parents and infants. Neurological immaturity, difficult temperament and sleep problems in infants, and impaired psychological conditions, limited resources and failures of intuitive competences in mothers were found to threaten the developmental process in infants and give rise to ‘vicious circles’ which were destabilizing the interactional systems. Increased attention to intuitive parental competences is recommended as one effective model for therapeutic interventions.     

Melodies in caregivers' speech: A species-specific guidance towards language

The author reports on a series of integrated studies on melodic contours in infant-directed (ID) speech. ID melodies in speech are taken as an instructive example of intuitive parenting in order to review current evidence on its forms, functions and determinants. The forms and functions of melodic prototypes are compared in terms of universal properties and individual and/or cultural variability across samples of German, Chinese and American mothers, and German mothers and fathers with their 2- and 3-month-old infants. Microanalyses of interactional contexts show that forms and functions of ID melodies are intimately related to typical dimensions of intuitive caregiving–arousing/soothing, turnyielding/turn-closing, approving/disapproving. The communicative functions of ID melodies as both categorical and graded signals are discussed with respect to the current knowledge on infant responses to ID speech and on early speech perception. According to a comprehensive longitudinal study of ID speech in relation to stages of infant vocalization, ID speech results from fine-tuned adjustments in various prosodic and linguistic features to developmental changes in infants' perceptual and vocal competence. ID melodies evidently have the potential to draw infant attention to caregivers' speech, to regulate arousal and affect in infants, to provide models for imitation, to guide infants in practising communicative subroutines and to mediate linguistic information. Current evidence suggests that the melodies in caregivers' speech provide a species-specific guidance towards language acquisition.     

Sensorimotor synchronization: Motor responses to pseudoregular auditory patterns

Musically trained and untrained subjects (N=30) were asked to synchronize their finger tapping with stimuli in auditory patterns. Each pattern comprised six successive tonal stimuli of the same duration, the first of which was accented by a different frequency. The duration of interstimulus onset intervals (ISIs) gradually increased or decreased in constant steps toward the end of the patterns. Four values of such steps were used in different trials: 20, 30, 45, and 60 msec. Various time-control mechanisms are hypothesized as being simultaneously responsible for subjects’ incorrect reproduction of the internal temporal ratios of the stimulus patterns. The mechanism of assimilation (of a central tendency) led subjects to enforce a regular (isochronous) structure on the patterns. The influence of other time-control mechanisms (distinction, subjective expression of an accent, sequential transfer) was expressed mainly in differences between intertap onset intervals (ITIs) and the corresponding ISIs at the beginning of the patterns. The duration of the first two ITIs was in the majority of the trials in an inverse ratio to the ratio of the respective ISIs. The distortions resulting from the timing mechanisms concerned were more pronounced in the performance of nonmusicians than in that of musicians.